LEGO WAREHOUSE - Setting up a Configurable Warehouse

In a context where the success of organizations depends on their ability to adapt to change, agile and flexible supply chains with the capacity to adapt effectively to these changes are key to build sustainable competitive advantage for the businesses.
The Logistic function plays a critical role as responsible for all the material flows, well synchronized with information flows, that assure healthy financial flows. The logistic function must focus on flexibility and agility, proactively addressing the uncertainty variables that affect increasingly complex decision parameters, thus contributing to the organization's ability to adapt to change.
As a technological reference company that operates on a global scale and in different sectors of activity, Efacec is attentive to the needs of sustainable development and innovation in logistic areas.
This challenge addresses the efficient storage of goods. Traditional warehouses are built to last. The initial investment is significant, with several years of payback and many days of data analysis, forecast and premises for the next 10 to 20 years! The structures and equipment are rigid, changes in the layout imply a significant cost, a new project with more analysis and forecast, new investments in equipment and obligation for the operations to stop.

Description

This challenge addresses the efficient storage of goods. Traditional warehouses are built to last. The initial investment is significant, with several years of payback and many days of data analysis, forecast and premises for the next 10 to 20 years! The structures and equipment are rigid, changes in the layout imply a significant cost, a new project with more analysis and forecast, new investments in equipment and obligation for the operations to stop.
This reality doesn’t serve the VUCA world we live on, much less it serves an Engineering To Order business in which Efacec operates. The storage needs for an electrification project in Ruanda are quite distinct from the needs for a photovoltaic parc project in Portugal. There is a need to configure the layout in the warehouses adapted to each project.
Setting up a warehouse configuration should be as simple and easy as playing with “Legos”!

Currently, there are thousands of software solutions for configurators, many with big data analytics, also thousands of sophisticated warehouse management systems, robots, automated warehouses, RFID, etc. but still, changing a layout is very expensive! Why? The equipment is fix and rigid and the information needed for decision making takes months to be produced and analysed. Meanwhile, the world has changed a thousand times.
The challenge sets in two deliverables, one is a software tool to support real-time decision-making. This tool must be dynamic using real-time and historical data from WMS’s, project evolution information from ERP, etc. and produces real-time information for decision making on how to configure the warehouse layout for the next period. The other deliverable is the flexible and configurable warehouse equipment that copes with this fast-changing model, meaning that it can easily be done by operational staff in the warehouse in a few hours or days.
If in Formula 1 it was possible to reduce the box time to a few seconds we need to reduce the change of layouts in the warehouses to a few hours!

Evaluation Criteria

- Solution flexibility
- Reconfiguration time
- Solution readiness
- Usability UX/UI

Reward

- Long-term partnership
- Solution validation
- Sustainable business oportunity
- Experimentation, exposure & expansion

Deadline

28^th May